 Hello, thank you so much for joining us today for an author Q&A with the wonderful Chris Saliza. And thank you to the National Archives for hosting this event. As many of you know, Chris has covered Washington DC politics for four decades. Don't want to date you there, Chris. Right, I'm going to kill old. Yeah. You started as a little, tiny little kid. Exactly, I was 10. You worked at CNN, a roll call, the Washington Post, of course. And your new book, Power Players, Sports, Politics, and the American Presidency is a fascinating read. I really enjoyed it. It's fun. And I learned a lot about presidents and what sports they enjoy and what it says about them. So thank you. Thank you for doing this. I really appreciate it. As someone who knows the White House and politics intimately, I appreciate you bringing your perspective to it. Well, of course, of course. We also go back a long time, so. Yes, we do. Yes. So the question you always get asked as an author is what made you want to write this book? What's so special about this topic to you? So I don't know if it's the same for you, but honestly, it was selfish, at least at the start. I sort of, when I abandoned my dreams of making the NBA at about age 14 or 15, I can't remember exactly when that was. But when I realized I was unlikely to be a professional basketball player, I realized I had to do something else with my life. And journalism was the thing that kind of jumped out. I always assumed, honestly, that I would be a sports journalist of some sort, because I was so passionate about sports and the people and the statistics. And I was so into all that stuff. I wound up obviously going a different route. I worked for somewhat randomly, worked for George Will in college, the conservative columnist. That led me to a job with Charlie Cook, the political handicapper, which then led me to Washington Post and the CNN. So I just sort of went down this other path that I wasn't expecting. I was not the kid who was like the president of the young Democrats or the young Republicans in college. I was not Alex P. Heaton, right, to data reference. But I was not that person. But I always kept this sort of flame alive of sports. I was always interested in it. I obviously, I played very amateurly, but I played pick up basketball in particular. So I always sort of kept a finger in that pie. So when my editor came to me and you can testify to this, sometimes they come to me and say like, hey, do you think there's another book in you? I knew I wanted to do something that I could be passionate about because I was concerned about writing a book just because it's daunting when they say, all right, well, we'll just need about 70,000 words and it's due in 18 months or whatever, two years. It's a daunting prospect. At least it was for me. As someone who writes more, I write a lot, but usually much shorter than that. I'm not writing books as a day-in, day-out job like you are. It was sort of scary. And so I wanted to do something that I felt I had some expertise in. I didn't want to start from utter scratch. And so I felt like I knew enough about politics, certainly, and presidents, but also enough about sports that I wouldn't start from zero. So the seed of the idea, the elevator pitch of the idea was the sports presidents played love and spectated and what it tells us about who they were and how they governed. That was the idea going in. Having never done this before, I candidly wasn't sure there were 60 however long of the book onto being a lot of words of book length through treatment for that question. We looked around and saw if there were other books like that. I started writing just to see how much we could do with each one. And it wound up being that idea wound up serving us well throughout the process. That as long as I kept coming back to that, what I didn't want to do was just a bunch of fun anecdotes. I mean, that's interesting. But I wanted to say something more about, OK, well, what does it tell us about who these people were and are? So as long as I kind of hewed back to that, I felt pretty good about where we were. But honestly, when I initially started, I wasn't sure that it would wind up as a book. I thought what I didn't want to do was write like my college essays. It's supposed to be it's a 20-page paper that's really an eight-page paper that you've changed the margins on. I didn't want to be that person. So I wanted to make sure it was a book length idea and it wound up being that. But it all grew from my selfish desire to write more about sports and to be in that space. I mean, it's fantastic because I will profess to not being a huge sports junkie. But what you do is you talk about how their love of sports kind of manifests itself and how they steer the country, like what the sports that they like to play or engage in says about them. So you talked about I love this. You said that Eisenhower's ability to see all angles, plan out all eventualities, and deal with all sorts of personalities in bridge and in life was on display during his most famous hour, the planning and execution of the D-Day attacks. I would never think of golf and bridge and sort of the mental skill that it takes to play sports and how it's like, is that one of the, because I honestly never really thought about it. What are a couple of examples of how the sports they liked? I'm just thinking about, and it's funny that JFK is one of the least kind of sporty of the president. Even though we have a perception of him that he was the most sporty and the most healthy and bright. Yeah. First on Eisenhower and bridge, so it's sort of fascinating. Eisenhower was a card player throughout his life. He actually earned the money to buy Mamie Eisenhower's ring with money he won from poker games, which is totally fascinating. Yeah. Once he joined the military, he's played poker less and played bridge more. Now, I would admit, I don't know much about bridge. I learned some throughout this process. But what I read, it's fascinating how deep you can, as I'm sure you've learned in book researching and writing, how deep you can go down rabbit holes when you do this sort of stuff. There's a whole trove of literature about how bridge is the closest approximation to war that exists, that you're playing with a partner, right? And you're also playing with two other people. So you are signaling and telegraphing to your partner certain things by the way you move. But you could also be bluffing to throw off your opponents. That there's a lot of jabs and faints and that sort of thing. That Eisenhower found sort of addictive to wildly the hours while these massive engagements were underway. There were a number of leaders, international and domestic, who took to bridge. That bridge was a sport that they loved. So yeah, I think that there's what I kept finding was, in some ways, the comparisons between the sports they played and who they were and how they governed was so spot on, it felt like a little awkward. So like Nixon. Nixon loved to bowl. Now, bowling was a bigger deal in the late 60s and early 70s that it is now. It was a much more major sport. Fun bowling fact. The first athlete to be sponsored by a company was, in fact, a bowler in the early 1970s, which, again, I didn't know going into this book. I learned as a result of this book. But Nixon loved to bowl. He had bowling ills installed in the White House. He would go, by his own admission, he used to talk in the press corps. He would go at 10 o'clock at night, many nights. And bowl seven to 12 games by himself. Now, that image of Nixon, right? Like our great loner president. The image of Nixon by himself just rolling frame after frame in his shirt and tie, right? The famous Big Lebowski picture. I think it's just so telling about who the guy fundamentally is. Bill Clinton, in college at Georgetown, he told a female friend of his. I'm paraphrasing, but this is very close to the direct quote. He said, if I run for 30 minutes a day, I can eat all the bad stuff I want. Oh, but that's true. If only he had really hit on something there. But the idea inherent in that, I think, governs his whole life, which is, if I do enough good stuff, I can cancel out the bad stuff that I do, right? But there's always these two sides to Bill Clinton. There's the one who runs and the one who loves fast food. Just one quick story on that. This is one of my favorite stories in the book. So when Clinton was governor of Arkansas, he would run out in the streets of Little Rock. And he would always finish up his runs at the same McDonald's where he would get food and eat there. And there's a plaque at that McDonald's in Little Rock that commemorates. This is where Bill Clinton would stop after his runs. But again, that idea of if I run enough, I can outrun the bad stuff that I've done, it feels very on the nose to me. I think even Obama and basketball, I won't go on too long, but Obama and basketball, so Barack Obama meets his dad twice in his entire life. One of the two times he meets them is at Christmas when Barack Obama is 11 years old, his father comes to Christmas in Hawaii with his grandparents. He gives him somewhat randomly, honestly, a basketball. Which is sort of a weird gift in that, at the time basketball was not a big deal in the elder Obama's native Africa. It's a big deal now in the country, but it wasn't that. And Obama himself, Obama the younger, is not super interested in basketball at that time. But he writes and dreams of my father, he writes about how the basketball, and he views it as sort of a charge, a sort of a message, like find a place where you can fit in and basketball helps him fit in. He uses it throughout his campaign to try to connect with people who view him as other. A guy named Barack Hussein Obama, with a Kenyan father and a white Kansas mother trying to run for president of the United States. He uses basketball as sort of his diplomacy, right? So I just kept coming back to, there were all these examples where the way in which these people were, and how they use sports was so spot on to how they approached governance, how they acted in office. And again, I found that gratifying because that was the theory of the book, I was always worried from the start that the theory of the book would wind up not being borne out, but it was. I think it's just so fascinating that I didn't know that, I had assumed because the famously Obama liked to play basketball on primary days, right? And the one primary he didn't play was when he lost it. Sure, yep. Yeah, and then he played again, you have in the book on election day of 2016, which also didn't really go the way he was. And was one of the last times he played too. I talked to Reggie Love, his body man, who was a basketball player at Duke, who was great for this, but he was like the perfect person for this book. Had spent time with Obama, had been involved in athletics, helped organize all those pickup games. So I asked Reggie Love, what was the last time Obama was really good? Like last game he played, he was really good. And he mentioned that day, election day 2016, it's also one of the last days he played because Obama has basically gotten out of the pickup basketball business, at least in part at the behest of Michelle Obama, who I think was concerned about him injuring himself as he aged, like tearing his Achilles tendon or hurting his knee. So he's, as a result, he's moved far more into, he plays golf a ton more now than he plays pickup basketball. Though they were worried throughout the campaign that he would take an elbow in the face or get a tooth knocked out or something, because he was to your point, he was playing basically on the day of all these primary and caucus votes, where at night you would have to appear and get a speech and do all the sorts of things. There's David Axelrod, I talked to him, his advisor, and there's a story in the book about Axelrod, like knocking him down in a pickup game, not intentionally. Right before the debate, right? Right before the debate. Yeah. Exactly. And there was like real concern that maybe Obama would have a black eye in the debate. So again, I think that, the other thing we haven't talked about, but I do think that there's a competitiveness, gene that is in a lot of these guys that makes you do stuff that you probably should do. The truth of the matter is Barack Obama on the day before, on the day of the debate, probably should be playing pickup basketball, but that's how he channeled his competitiveness. That's how he got ready for a debate. That was sort of his preparation. I mean, you see it over and over again. George H.W. Bush, who I know you've written on the past as well, he's just super competitive. Like his daughter Doro told me that as he aged, he would have competitions with the grandkids about who could fall asleep fastest. You know, like, which by the way, is a great parenting tactic, but I wish I had known when my kids were younger. But like, so they're just competitive people by nature. And I mean, it's horse shoes too. You talk about that, which I forgot too. I love the horse shoe games. He played with the house man at the White House and it was so competitive that they would even have like T-shirts made up for the different teams. And at the end, they told me that they let him win. But that's another thing I wanted to ask you is you're playing the president of the United States. Are you really competing him? Like- And that's one of the questions I always asked. I asked everybody I could that question about Obama because I was fascinated. As somebody who plays pickup basketball and has played basketball my whole life, one of the questions I was most interested in just selfishly was, is Barack Obama actually good at basketball? Cause it's so hard to tell. And what I learned is he's probably like a D3 bench player. He's a pretty good athlete. He's left-handed, which is a huge advantage in basketball. Pretty good shooter. Smart sort of can fit into the game no matter what kind of games being played. Is he as good as, for his 47th or 48th birthday, I believe, he had an event where a bunch of NBA guys came and they played at Fort McNair in Virginia. Is he that good? No, I mean, he's not even close to good enough to be an NBA player, but he could run with those guys. He did the same thing in 2008. He played with the University of North Carolina basketball team before the North Carolina primary. Again, he's not good enough on a raw basis to play with them. But yeah, it's so hard to know how good or bad these guys are at things. And that was one of my struggles because there are some objective guidelines. So Gerald Ford is clearly a very good athlete. He played offensive line at the University of Michigan. He was an all-American. He had offers to go pro from the Lions and the Bears. So objectively, he's a good athlete. George H.W. Bush was the starting first baseman on the Yale baseball team and the captain. So again, objectively, a pretty good athlete. Once you get beyond those two, it starts to get a little bit dicey. It's two of the people that we think of as, like, you know, Bush was criticized for kind of being weak, right? And sort of, and then Ford was a punchline and he write about SNL and how it made Chevy Chase famous, like the whole stumbling, you know, the idea that he couldn't even, you know, walk in a straight line kind of dropping things and everything. And I think it still bugs the Ford family because I've talked to Ford's daughter, Susan, about it, and that, like, that people do have a complete misunderstanding of how it's what he was as a... You're totally, you're 100% right. And I actually think some of that was Ford's fault. And I'll tell you why. So he's clearly like, I did 13 presidents. So I did Eisenhower to Biden. Is it possible Millard Fillmore was a great, maybe, but I didn't go back that far. It's hard because you start getting into sports and aren't played anymore and that becomes a whole other thing. But clearly in the 13 that I looked at, Jerry Ford is by far the best athlete. I mean, it's not even close. He's like an elite level athlete. I think that Ford was self-conscious about the idea that he was just a jock. That that was sort of how he came into prominence. That was how people knew him. It was sort of the lead of his story. This is in the book, but Lyndon Johnson used to joke that Jerry Ford played too many football games without a helmet on. So this idea that he was dumb. And so as a result, I think Ford really downplayed his athlete prowess. He didn't talk about it. He was, no one knows. The guy's an incredibly gifted skier. He's one of the people who's responsible for basically turning Vale Colorado into Vale Colorado. Like they went and lived there. He skied there. He was in the phone book. People would call him up. Like he was like a citizen of Vale and was responsible for a lot of that. They had a home there and was responsible for building it up in a lot of ways. He was kind of like the de facto mayor. But he didn't talk about it. He didn't really talk about his football career a whole heck of a lot, including seminal experiences he had. There's a guy named Willis Ward an African-American player who was banned from playing when they would play certain Southern teams. And, you know, Ford was very adamant that he wouldn't play if Ward wouldn't, they were roommates. He wouldn't play if Ward wouldn't play. I mean, there's a lot in that story to tell, honestly, beyond just like I was good at sports. You could write a book about his, about it fascinates me that he gave, you know, at the time he was offered this great NFL. I mean, wasn't he offered a spot in the NFL? And he turns, yeah. And so he turns it down to go to law school, right? But now you, and you write this, it never in a million years would someone do it. So that's true. The pay scale was a little different back then. Yeah, I think, but, but yeah, I mean, he made a conscious decision to downplay his athletic accomplishments when he pursued politics. I think, I tend to think that was a little bit of a mistake. I don't know if, I don't know if Jerry Ford is elected today. I think he probably approaches it differently. We live in an era where, where the personal is so much more political than it was at the time. You know, I mean, at the time there was like some reasonable expectation that you would have your personal life was your personal life and your public life was your public life. Now I feel like that, that division is totally eroded out. So I think Jerry Ford would be telling, I always think of like, what does the Jerry Ford campaign ad look like? You know, back in, like when he's introducing himself if he was running today. And you know, there's a big helping of, he was a really good athlete. I was reminded of like, So Rhonda Santis is gonna announce for president sometime very soon. And they're already talking about the fact that he's a really good baseball player and that they, you know, he played at Yale. And you know, so it just feels like nowadays it's sort of part and parcel of how you run for president is to tell that story. And if it includes sports, all the better, honestly. Ford in some ways was the opposite of that. He had this amazing sports story to tell to your point. I did a thing this weekend, a book festival. I asked people, just, you know, in the crowd, if you've heard of Jerry Ford, what's your impression of him? Clumsy, old, padded golf, you know, and like this is again, this isn't a elite level athlete. This is someone who played division one football and had professional offers. But again, I do think that a little bit, if not more than a little bit has to do with Ford and the way that he approached his political career by downplaying his athletic accomplishments, which you don't, you usually see the exact opposite of that. You see people overplaying their athletic accomplishments. Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, in order to sort of make themselves more appealing to the average voter. What kind of sports do presidents lean into the most? I mean, JFK didn't want people to know that he played golf, right? Because it was an elitist sport. LBJ pretended to like baseball, right? To get Senator Russell to be his friend. Like they use sports in a political way. And I was really, I thought that was really interesting that there are certain sports like baseball and football that are really all American. And golf is kind of an elitist. And I don't, you write about pickleball a little bit there too. And I'm not sure if where that's gonna fall because it's a bit of a country club sport, right? But it is. But it's also a sport for older folks, which are prime voters. So I think the next president, whoever it is will probably be photographed on a pickleball court at some point in the future for that reason. But yeah, so Kennedy is I think a great example of this. As you mentioned, so there's a guy at Golf Magazine whose job is swing analysis. That's all he does. He analyzes swings. So thanks to YouTube. I was able to send him video of every president that I covered swing. There's some footage of them swinging a golf ball. Yeah. And so I said to him and I said, can you just break down their swings? Just tell me like who had a good swing, who had a bad swing? And he said by far JFK had the best natural golf swing and it was the best natural golfer. He said that in spite of the fact that JFK obviously had issues with his health at his back, which if your back is bad, it makes it hard to be good at golf. But yeah, JFK was very opposed to, and his family was very opposed to playing up his golf background, because they still thought it had that whiff of elitism. And I'll note, he had been one of the Democrats who was extremely critical of the amount of golf that Eisenhower played when he was in office. So JFK had criticized Eisenhower for basically being the golfer in chief. And in truth, and I write about this in the book, Eisenhower did play a lot of golf. Way more than Obama or Trump or anyone else in the modern era. He would take months off and basically go play golf in Colorado. So I think JFK is cognizant of that whiff of elitism. He's obviously already sort of closely aligned with sailing, which is another sort of elitist, New England, blue blood, blue blood spore. So I think that's why you see them play up these touch football games. And the truth of the matter is JFK's health is so hit or miss that there's a number of times he's not even able to play in these games. I mean, he's so infirm. One thing I found fascinating that I didn't know is one theory about his bad back, which played him, excuse me, played him throughout his life, was that he played freshman football at Harvard for a brief period of time. And after one of the games, a family friend sort of jokingly tackles him from behind and hurts his back. And like one of the theories is that that at least played some role in the sort of the degenerative back issues he had throughout his life. But yeah, I mean, the truth of Camelot, obviously the perception and the reality we've learned were two very different things. Well, that is also true when it came to sports. Like the idea, I think they liked the idea of football because it was very much a blue collar, average Joe perceived sport. And the truth is he was barely able to play. The other one that jumps to mind there is Nixon. So Nixon is like actually a genuine fan of sports to the, on the verge of being a fanatic. He's sort of maniacal about what he knows about players and stats and numbers. He knows a lot like much more than the average person does. But football in particular, he views as the sport of the silent majority and college football, even more specifically, he views as the sport of the silent majority that this is where his base goes and watches. He goes to the 1969, it's called the game of the century, Texas versus Arkansas, both undefeated, non-national television. Nixon goes into the booth at halftime, Arkansas is winning. He predicts that Texas will win. Texas comes back and wins. Who's watching that game? A young Bill Clinton who never forgives Nixon because he believes that Nixon jinxed his Arkansas Razorbacks team. But yes, Nixon, I think, I think Nixon is one of the more interesting, my two favorite chapters to write were Nixon and George H.W. Bush. H.W. Bush for reasons we can talk about. He's just so competitive and sort of like, definitely a good sport. But Nixon, because he had these two sides to him, he was a real and genuine fan of sports. He was the kind of guy who would watch it on the weekends, unlike a Reagan, for example, who didn't really care or a Johnson who really didn't care. At the same time, Nixon was a utterly political creature too. And he sort of understood there's a memo that was written about college football that Nixon should associate himself as closely as possible with college football and the military tied into college football because it was good for his politics. So you can never really separate out. It's so hard. One of the biggest challenges is to separate out. What did they do for political reasons? And what did they do because they enjoyed doing the sporting events? And that's, it's very hard to tell. Who had the best sort of relationship with professional sports players? Like I'm thinking of Schwarzenegger and Bush 41, right? It always strikes me that presidents are most excited. When LeBron James came to the White House, I remember like Obama was so excited. Everyone was really excited. I mean, these are ultra huge celebrities and even at the White House, there's a bit of an awe that they inspire in people. Are there some good stories? I know Arnold Palmer and Eisenhower, right? Yeah, Arnold Palmer and Eisenhower were very, very close. Sort of, if you talk to people in the golf world, they essentially credit Eisenhower and Arnie with creating the modern golf world. That golf, that at the end of World War II, people had a few things that they had never had before. Some money and leisure time. And they didn't really know what to do with either of those things, which is a funny problem to have. I would love to have that problem now, but at the time it was different, right? And people were moving to the suburbs. Suburbs had really existed prior to that. And our Eisenhower and Palmer give the public an idea of what you can do, like that they go and play golf. And that was a thing that then became acceptable in the country. What's fascinating is even though it continues to keep the sort of whiff of elitism that has Kennedy worried about doing it, during the fifties, there are factories that have golf teams. And like it becomes at least in part a more blue collar sport. Again, partly due to Eisenhower and partly due to Arnold Palmer, which I thought was sort of utterly fascinating that that's the way that that played out. Yeah, I think it'll be interesting when, and I think it will hopefully happen sooner than later when we have a woman, I don't know if that's evident. And did you think a bit about, is there gonna be pressure on her to take up a sport or are women kind of given? I don't remember ever hearing Hillary Clinton talking about sports. And I think she might have bowled once in Iowa or something, but is this like an ultramasculine? I mean, you talk about Trump looking at sports as combat, right? Totally. Wrestling. 100%. Testosterone driven. And in that way, it's kind of a sort of antiquated silly thing in my view to expect every president to be interested in sports. And maybe there will be a female president who's a great basketball player. I don't know, but it shouldn't be a prerequisite, right? No, and the truth of the matter is, it's not a prerec- I think that all of these 13 people with the exception of Johnson to some extent who just didn't care, they all went out of their way to portray themselves as sportsmen. Now portraying yourself as a sportsman versus being an actually good athlete are two very different things. The only people who are at all sort of like athletes in any way that we would think of again are Ford and older Bush. I'm fascinated by your question though, and I did do some thinking on it because somebody asked me, sometimes the questions you get after you write the book spark things you wish you had put in the book. But somebody asked me, do you think it's possible someone could get, someone male or female could get elected president now without being able to sort of speak the language of sports? Which is a different thing than being an athlete, right? And you know, I thought back to 2004 and John Kerry calling Lambeau Field Lambert Field, which is, if you remember, was a huge story. Yeah. And him parasailing, which was seen as an elitist sport and Bush ran ads at the end of the campaign where John Kerry is parasailing back and forth as a way to say he's flip-flopping. And I wonder, I mean, I wonder if that's true. I sort of, through the course of this book, I've become convinced that there are two things that you have to at least pay some amount of deference to religion and sports. And sports is a sort of religion in this country, in and of itself. But it's the same question of could we elect someone who is an atheist, a, you know, who comes out and says, I do not believe in God, as opposed to like they go to church every once in a while. Like I do not think Donald Trump is a deeply religious man. I don't think Barack Obama was a terribly religious man, but they played the role of, they went to a church, you know, they played that role. The question is, could you, again, could you get elected if you couldn't, if you were utterly uninterested in sports and had no ability to fake it? Again, people, Ronald Reagan was not interested in sports. To the extent he cared about anything he cared about Notre Dame football because he had played George Gip in a movie called Newt Rocking All-American about the Notre Dame football. Like, he was not, he was not a hugely, he was not a guy who was watching sports in the weekend. He would horseback. He would horseback. He would horseback, right? He was sporty in that way, but he was not interested in sports per se. He was not a guy who was looking, you know, this is again, an antiquated reference, but opening the sports page in the newspaper and looking at the box scores, like that was not a thing he did. He was not like Nixon listening to games on the weekend, watching games on the weekend. But Reagan understood, I mean, one of the things that I love in the book is that Reagan was the guy who formalized bringing sports teams, winning sports teams to the White House. Now, again, Reagan didn't really, Reagan was not watching the NBA finals, like really closely, or even maybe the Super Bowl all that closely. But what he understood was being close to elite winning athletes was a good thing for Ronald Reagan. You mentioned earlier, and I sort of skipped over it, and I'll come back to it. Who liked being in the presence of athletes the most? And I would say probably Reagan. There's all these great stories about how when Karima, the Lakers were very good during Reagan's presidency. So he would meet them. They would win championships fairly frequently. And he would always comment on how tall Karima Abdul-Jabbar was now. He had to duck when he went into the White House, into the Oval Office. Like he was fascinated by that. Reagan loved all the pomp and circumstance. There's great YouTube clips of him shooting a puck through a net that they had built outside the Oval Office. And shooting a basket and throwing a football. And there's- Was he a president though? You were saying, I'm sorry, you're just reminding me. In the book, you wrote about a president who was showing John McNamara how to hold a tennis racket. Bill Clinton. Okay, I think that is the funniest thing. Like the hubris of that. Terry McCulloch told me that story, that Clinton always fashioned just as a sidebar. Clinton fashioned himself as a better athlete than he was. I mean, he was- Matt McCarty, who went on to be his chief of staff was sort of the athlete Bill Clinton always wished he could be. They're both from Arkansas. Matt McCarty was an all-state quarterback. Bill Clinton was in the band. Now, he was a very good saxophone player, but he was in the band at a time when in the football crazy South. But yeah, Terry McCulloch told me the story of how Clinton sort of fancied himself an expert on almost everything, including tennis, which he played very, very briefly. You know, he was not like an inveterate tennis player. He played on occasion. But yeah, showing John McEnroe a suggestion on the grip. I love that story. I love that story. And I can't believe John McEnroe, because he would be the one person who would be like, what the hell are you doing? Right? You might get mad. Yeah, I thought that was such a great story in the book. And the book is full of like little things like that that just kind of reveal a lot about the person. And so I can't like not ask about Trump and Biden to get to the more recent presidents and how they are. It seems to me like I'm, I really knew nothing about Biden in sports. Yeah. He doesn't. So a couple of things. One is, you know, he's 77 years old. So he's not like super active as a sportsman at this point. Like compared to Barack Obama who's in his 40s when he's president, even Bill Clinton, these people are just much younger. I mean, Joe Biden is elected in his mid 70s as president. So he is not as active as you would as some of these other guys just by dint of, you know, actuarial tables. He plays golf relatively well. If you remember, he was part of a summit. John Kasek, who was then the governor of Ohio, John Boehner, who was then the speaker of the house, Barack Obama and Joe Biden played golf together as sort of a bipartisan thing. Biden is by the numbers the best golfer of that group. But on the one hole, the press was allowed to watch Bogeed while the other three part, which I think irked him. But I checked with Mark Nohler, who used to work at CBS News and he's sort of the keeper of all these records of, you know, how many times they played golf, how, where they've gone on vacation. And Biden had only played golf the last time I checked with Mark, and this is post book publication, but the last time I checked with Mark, he only played like 20 times total. Whereas Trump played 90 plus times by this point in his presidency. So Biden is not a terribly active golfer. Certainly not in the mold of Obama or Trump. And who's doing business, by the way, when they're golfing? Who uses golf? Like you mentioned the Boehner golf habit. Like which president sees this as pure relaxation and who sees it as like, I'm gonna get a deal done. So Bill Clinton definitely pure relaxation. I think Bill Clinton liked, he liked the idea, he talked about this and this is in the book. He liked the idea of how long golf took. Because he liked to have that time away from the office. You know, one of the things that the through line through all these guys is they all play golf. Some more, some less, but that's the one sport that they all played all 13 of them. And I asked a bunch of people throughout the process, like why golf? Like why was golf the thing that always came up? And the thing that people told me in the, the responses were actually quite similar was that golf is a sport. So as you know, having written about the White House extensively, like the presidency is effectively a gilded cage. You can't, it's, there's a lot of nice pieces to it, but you can't really be normal. You can't go out for a run. You know, Bill Clinton was the last president who would like run out in the streets. George W. Bush would chafe under the fact that he wasn't allowed to run out in the streets. They hadn't a track, they didn't really use, et cetera, et cetera. But so it's, you can almost never feel normal and that these guys for, you know, the Secret Services obviously is still there when you're on the golf course, but they're not right in front of you. Maybe they're on the sort of the fringes of your eyesight on the, you know, in the rough. You're out in nature. You can be with your friend, people you've known for a long time. And for four, five, or, you know, six, I guess, hours depending on how good or bad you are at golf, you can feel somewhat normal. And I think that was very much the appeal of, for a lot of these guys. Now, I think that both Obama and Trump used golf to some extent for political reasons, you know, Obama to try to outreach to Republicans. I think Trump, particularly internationally, would play with foreign leaders, particularly the Japanese. One thing I will say about Trump is, you know, when he came into office and when he was running for office, he would say, I won't be like Obama. I'm not gonna play golf just to play golf. I'm gonna play to influence people. You know, I'm only gonna play golf as an input. The truth of the matter is like, 85% of the time he played golf, it was with people he was already friends with. He did a little bit of outreach in the same way that Obama did a little bit of outreach. But I would say most of these guys played golf for the fun of it. To the extent they got anything relationship-wise out of it, it was gravy, but not usually their primary goal. You mentioned the secret service and like, you know, the mountain biking that AMW did. And then he lost the mountain bike at one point, right? He fell off a bike twice, yes. What is the challenge? Another great story you have in the book, and I just, some of these things really stood out to me was about Reagan horseback riding with a secret service agent, and they would have them dressed similarly and have the horses look similar. Horses look similar, yes. But if someone tried to actually assassinate the president, they would shoot the secret service agent, I guess is the darkest interpretation. That was the theory, yes. It's kind of shocking to read that, but of course that's what they're thinking through. I mean, are there, does the secret service kind of like just, what kind of challenges are there finding a secret service agent who's a great horseback rider, right? Like it's not like everybody else. Yes, I mean, they went through a number of, I think they realized that with Reagan, they realized, well, he's gonna ride and he's pretty good at riding. So we can't just have someone who's like can sit on a pony. Like we need someone who knows how to ride. And they had to find a specific guy who grew up riding horses with his dad, who just happened to be in the secret service, who they elevated to this job. Same thing with Bush, the younger, George W. One of the things I found fascinating about him is, so he goes running on the day after his 40th birthday party where by his own admission, he had too much to drink. And he writes and talks about this later in his life that he sort of reaches this crisis moment on that run that either he can continue to live the life he's been living with drinking or he can live a life that is different and more health-focused, he channels a lot. He has a bit of an addictive personality, Bush. I think he channels a lot of that addictive personality into these endurance sports that he picks up later in life. So you mentioned mountain biking and running. He has this group at Crawford at the ranch in Texas called like the 100 Club that are people who go running with him when it's 100 degrees or hotter. And he does these 100-mile wounded warrior races on mountain bikes. Like there is definitely a sort of addictive piece to him that channels in endurance sports. But to your point about the secret service, yeah. I mean, look, Bush in particular is a good runner. Clinton was an okay runner. Carter was an okay, you know, we're both fine cross-country runners, but Bush runs fast. And so what I found so interesting was it's not just you need someone who can run, but think about it. You need someone who can run at Bush's pace to any event that someone attacks him has the both the wherewithal and the endurance to fight that person off. I found that totally fascinating. So again, they had to do this sort of broadcasting to try to find people who fit that bill. I mean, and they have to run presumably with guns or weapons on them. I mean, I was totally, I'm glad you mentioned that because that is not something that has come up in a bunch of my conversations with people. But I do think that that's a totally fascinating element of all this, that sort of secondary, the people who staff these guys when they did their activities. Well, you know, I'm always interested in the staff. Like that's the point where they are like seeing them. And I always wonder if the staff is like making small talk with them or if they just want to be like you go out there and run and don't say anything. Right? One fascinating thing, and this isn't staff, but with Bill Clinton, you remember that running with him around Washington was like a very prestigious gig. And there's a quote in the book that it was, people say it was better to get invited to that and get invited to a state dinner because it was just you one-on-one. There's also stories in the book of people who thought that running with Bill Clinton would basically be walking and talking. And that Bill Clinton took it very seriously and that these people couldn't hang. And that after a half a mile or whatever, they would drop out and sort of like lag behind. So it was not the experience they had thought it was. But it just goes to show you like these guys, particularly Bush and Clinton, they were out for the exercise. These are competitive people by nature, ambitious people by nature. These are not people who run 20 minute miles. Like if they're out there, they're gonna run as fast as they possibly can, particularly Bush, I think was just driven by the nature of his personality to be sort of faster and faster and run in these difficult conditions and do these rides that other people wouldn't do in this endurance stuff. And I think you touch on this in the book, but a lot of that is stress relief from this job, right? They have the weight of their shoulders and runners often get a lot of stress reduction from the endorphins and all of that with running. Absolutely. One thing that really stood up out to me also was Bush 43 being the first and only president to play Little League. I know, right? Yeah, that's crazy. Little League of America is totally fascinating to me because they have incredible records. So I talked to the Steve Keener who's the president of Little League of America. I talked to him and we talked about baseball and the first pitch initiative that Bush started in the White House and all that sort of stuff, but he had the actual roster for Midland, Texas of George W. Bush with George H. W. Bush as one of the listed coaches that he sent to me. Like the actual, they have rosters of every team that has ever played Little League, which to me, the amount of paper that involves, but the record is totally fascinating. So I have, it's like Midland, Texas, it's their home, which is now a museum that they lived in at the time. And yeah, I was sort of fascinated by that too because baseball is sort of so ingrained in our like, you know, America's pastime. But yeah, he was the first and I think only one because I don't think, I don't know that anyone after him did. Donald Trump was a good baseball player, not as good as he said, I mean, this is true of a lot of things with Donald Trump, not as good as he says he was. He has said he was the best baseball player in the state of New York. He was not, there's plenty of evidence to suggest he was not, but he was a pretty good baseball player. But I don't think he played Little League. He played, he played in high school, but he did not play Little League. So yeah, sort of a weird anomaly, right? Yeah, I was totally stunned by that, you know? One thing that's, go ahead, I'm sorry. No, no, somebody was asking who was listening and on the chat they said who started the presidents throwing out the first ball to begin baseball season while we're on baseball. So I believe it's William Howard Taft, which is hilarious because Taft was not, Taft was like one of the least athletic, obviously he was a big guy, you know, the whole like he had a bathtub that could fit six regular people. But I believe it was Taft and until the 90s, maybe 80s, 90s, they threw it from the stand. So if you see any old-timey, like if you see LBJ throw out a first pitch or JFK throw out a first pitch, they do it from the stand. Taft certainly threw it from the stand. It was only later in these last couple of decades that they would go out on the field and just while we're on the top of the first pitches, I feel like I have to mention the sort of, the seminal moment I think for most people, it's on the cover of the book. For people who think about politics and sports coming together. Yes. The thing that jumps out is Bush's pitch after 9-11, which is right. I mean, it's on the cover of the book for a reason. And I think for a lot of people, I went back and watched that clip and talked to a bunch of people who had been involved in it. And it's really interesting. And I urge people who haven't watched it in a while, if you watched it live, you don't really remember, do you remember it vaguely? Go back and watch it. It's readily available on YouTube. When he is announced to the crowd, it's very muted his reaction. And I was trying to put myself back in that place in that moment. If you think about it, it was a month after the attacks. It was actually not game one of the World Series. It was game three of the World Series. Major League Baseball wanted Bush to throw out the first pitch in Arizona where the first games were played. And he said, no, I want to do it in New York. So it was actually game three. But there were threats against the country. There were threats against Bush. He has a bulletproof vest on while he's out there. And there's a nervousness that you can hear in the crowd. He throws the ball from the mound, perfect strike, and you hear the crowd just sort of release. And there's, in that moment, you know, look, it's much more than just a ceremonial ball thrown to a catcher before the start of the game, right? It says, we've been knocked on, but we're gonna get up. There's a resilience. There's a willpower there. Well, they were canceling the end of the season, right? Correct. They were considering canceling the entire MLB season and Bush steps in and says, no. Yeah. And I just think that moment, if you're talking about iconic first pitches, that moment really stands out. And that moment is one of the centerpieces of the book just because of how much I think it speaks to, it's not just about sports. You know, if it was just a guy throwing the ball over the plate, we'd all go home and we wouldn't remember it 20 years later. But I think it's about so much more than that. Well, I mean, sports is undeniably part of our culture and it's, America has a love affair. Like you said, I mean, I think you're right. A president couldn't, I don't think we could have a president who was agnostic, A, or not really able to fake sports. No, I think it would be really hard. And again, they wouldn't be the first person to fake interest, you know? I mean, like you mentioned LBJ, I mean, the story in the book that I find utterly fascinating is, he didn't care at all about sports. Like there are all these moments when he was little where he's talking to the older men about politics while his friends are playing baseball together, you know? It's weird because he's like a big kind of gruff, huge guy. You would think he would be really into sports, right? He's really into manliness. Like very into like, you know, I mean there's, this is obviously from Robert Caro's book, but moments where, you know, he's like going to the bathroom and he's got his aides in there. He has a nickname for his genitalia. Like he views himself as a very manly man, but was not at all interested in sports, though interestingly, a very good dancer and like to dance. Oh. Which I didn't know. He was a lady. Right, he was a lady's man. But there's one moment, and you mentioned it earlier, and I just want to flesh it out just for a sec. So he comes to Washington and he knows he wants to get close to Richard Russell, the Senator from Georgia, the Senate Majority Leader, sort of the power in Washington. And what he realizes is two things. Russell's a bachelor and Russell loves baseball. But Russell doesn't like to go to baseball games by himself because he's the Senate Majority Leader. He views it as kind of like beneath him to just be there, like keeping score by himself. So what does Johnson do? Johnson fakes interest about the fact that he likes sports and baseball in particular. So he goes over and over again to sport, to baseball games with Russell, and they build that relationship. Russell is convinced that LBJ is sort of a fellow traveler in love of baseball. When in fact LBJ could kill us, and John Conley, who an LBJ aide who goes on to become the governor of Texas, would always joke with LBJ about, oh, you're really interested in baseball now, huh, Lyndon? Like, he just was not interested at all. But he used it for those purposes. And I think, again, that's an example of even these politicians who didn't really care understood they had to fake it until they made it. Reagan is one. Johnson is absolutely one. Carter didn't do a good job of faking it to his detriment. We haven't really talked about him much. But he was actually somewhat sporty. But again, the image we have of him is a kind of wimp week. He did not do a good job of using sport, the medium of sports, to be able to talk. And of course, he's then followed an office by Reagan, who could care less about sports than Carter, but understood the perception piece so much better. So another viewer is asking, are LBJ and Carter the only modern presidents who didn't play? So they actually both did golf. The question is right, though, that they both were very infrequent golfers. At the top of the list, you have Eisenhower, and then you have Obama, Trump, Clinton. And then it sort of drops off from there. Johnson, interestingly, though, this is one of my favorite things about Johnson. So he's not, again, he's not in the sports. He doesn't really care. He would play golf on occasion. And this is so him, not caring about other people and flouting the rules. He would often hit eight or nine balls until he got a hit that he felt was right. So there would just be balls scattered all over, because he was in his own world. He didn't really care about the rules of golf. He was much more focused on what's good for Lyndon Johnson. And what was good for Lyndon Johnson would be to just hit ball after ball after ball, which, by the way, he was not alone in doing. Bill Clinton famously would take, they call them billigans. He would famously take mulligans when he didn't hit a good shot. Donald Trump is, I don't think he's breaking any ground here to say a notorious golf cheat. So several of them bent the rules, but I just love LBJ flouting it. Like just didn't care at all about anyone he was playing with or anything else. He just hit ball after ball after ball. But the question is basically right. Neither of them were avid golfers by any means. And Trump's use of wrestling, I mean, so much of politics is showmanship, right? And wrestling, mostly faith, right? So I mean, what is his, does he really enjoy wrestling? Is this something he really cares about or is it connecting to his base? So I think he, I think, so first of all, he and Vince McMahon, who is the, until very recently they sold it, but until very recently the head of world wrestling entertainment are close friends. And Trump doesn't have a lot of close friends, nor does he have, I think, a lot of people he views as equals, you know, outside of his family. I think he views McMahon as sort of an equal. So I think he looks to McMahon at times. And I do think there were lessons learned, particularly in the way he campaigned in 2016 from professional wrestling, like outside storylines ripped from the headlines, right? Like whatever had just been in the news, Trump was commenting on, like leading edge. He was, he was kind of, it's very much in tune with wrestling. The idea that he still propagates this idea that there's this group of people who are good, basically him and the people who support him. And then there are these people who are evil, who are trying to destroy the country. That whole like faces in professional wrestling parlance, faces the good guys and heals the bad guys. And that you cheer for these guys, and you boo these guys, and these guys are unalteringly good, and these guys are all bad. You know, a lot of that sort of black and white thinking he uses in his political campaigns. He's also featured in several storylines within the WWE in the 1990s. He's featured in two storylines, basically playing himself. But yeah, I think you would do worse to understand Donald Trump than to watch some professional wrestling, genuinely. In that, I just think there's a great book that's just out about Vince McMahon, which I would recommend to people because I think in reading about McMahon, you come to understand a fair amount about Trump. I know we have to wrap it up, but I am curious. Was there anything that like really surprised you when you were doing the reporting for this book? I'll give you like a little thing and then a big thing. So the little thing that was just fun was I didn't know that Trump played squash in college. So he played squash his one year at Fordham. He plays squash. I talked to Mark Fisher, who wrote that Trump revealed the biography out of him I used to work with at the Washington Post. I talked to him about Trump as a squash player and he said he wasn't great because he was so impatient. You know, squash his game of angles and thinking three shots ahead and that Trump would just get annoyed and just wail the ball, which again is almost too spot on, right? There's a story of Trump. They went to play at the Naval Academy and lost and Trump wouldn't take the team boss. He would drive his own sports car to and from with his friends from the team. So after that loss, they go to a department store. He goes in, he buys a set of clubs, brand new clubs, balls, teas, and they go out over the Chesapeake Bay on their way back and just hit balls into the bay over and over again. And when they're done after about 45 minutes, they just leave the brand new clubs by the side of the road and drive off. It's again, it was almost too spot on. Donald Trump is sort of like running through things recklessly and like what he leaves behind. So that was the little thing that I just found fascinating because honestly when I started the book, I did not think I was going to learn a lot about Donald Trump. Of all the presidents, I felt like I knew him the best. The bigger thing was that the thesis of the book, which is that these presidents, that the alternate working title of the book that I liked but my publisher didn't like was called It's Way More Than A Game. The idea being it's not just about men on a field or women on a field playing softball or baseball or 11 people playing soccer or whatever, it speaks to something about our country and the people our country puts forward as its leaders, that there's an expectation that they can speak the language of sports, that they've played sports at some level, that they understand what sports means to people that it is in fact about more than just this thing that is happening in a bounded time period where there's a win and there's a loss. And that the similarities between the kind of person who is drawn to being an elite athlete, the kind of person who is drawn to being an elite politician and I will put anyone who is president of the United States in the elite politician category, they have achieved far above what expectations would be that there are so many similarities, competitiveness, ambition, a desire to be sort of approved and loved by the public. So that surprised me in the best possible way in that when you do have that initial German of an idea to see it bloom into what winds up being a broader book, I, again, felt was really gratifying. It's a wonderful read and for people who love sports, they could really drill down and get into it, but even for people who are just interested in presidents and politics and history, so it kind of runs the gamut. And I would put a pitch in, one thing I didn't wanna do was write a political polemic, like I had spent the last five years at CNN, like this is a book that, yes, it touches on politics because it's about presidents, but it's not political, right? It's not, you're a Republican, you're a Democrat, you don't follow politics, you're a Green Party, whatever. You should be able to enjoy this book for the stories and the history as opposed to, I don't go through Barack Obama saying, if you like your doctor, you can keep him, or George W. Bush in Mission Accomplished, or many Donald Trump's many untruths. I really tried to keep it narrowly focused on sports and what it said about who they were as people and what it says about us of why we elect who we elect. Well, you did a great job because it's not partisan in any way, shape, or form. So Republicans, Democrats, I mean, it's anyone can read it and be interested in it. So we have to end it, I could talk to you forever, but it's a fantastic read, it's so entertaining, and I learned a lot and I had a little fun too, because like I said, I'm not a super sports person, but these are human stories. That's right. So I highly recommend, and thanks for asking me to moderate. Thank you for doing it. Thanks, Kate. Thank you.